long post

[paulhope]

In no particular order:

• I've been meaning for a long time to gloat about the awesome potluck we through at Oxford two weekends ago. Several things made it awesome:
  • A crazy dish Katie and I but mostly Katie came up with/cooked, which was made from
    1. 2 cups quinoa, cooked in a big skillet with a little garlic (there was garlic,right?), to which she/we added
    2. a can of coconut milk and some water, ultimately throwing in some
    3. chopped almonds and
    4. chopped figs
    It was awesome.
  • Great people. I originally wanted to list them all with brief character sketches just to give the idea of the crazy combination of folks there, but there's no time for that now and it would have been overdoing it anyway. The main point would have been to do justice to the people who have been very important in my life this summer but who I have not yet mentioned. Let me get some names out: the Other Paul (see below); Chuck Washington; Abraham; Whitney Wood with friend ER (daughter of MJA, from Thanksgiving); Igor the Russian ITA intern; Raf, my Macau-born, UK-educated Eurotrash friend long-lost from Freshman year; my sister; Melanie and James, the Two Favorite People; Chuck the agriculture guy; and the Aristides Connection. I think that was all. Oh, Katie and myself. Anyway, the point is that people from different spheres of my life mingled. And that's a sweet feeling.
  • A totally awesome party game, introduced by Igor, which is like Telephone, but played on a peice of paper. Somebody writes a sentence, then passes it along. The next person draws a picture illustrating that sentence, then folds over the previous work so that it can't be seen by the next person, who has to write a sentence describing that picture, and so on. There are many peices of paper in circulation, so everybody is entertained, except for Chuck Washington, who is doing dishes because he didn't bring any food.
  • Whitney Wood's comment: "You straddle two worlds." I knew what it meant, I think
• Whitney Wood is in Boston now for the summer. It's awesome, as expected.
• Doing UI design for ITA has let me learn a lot of sweet stuff about web design and the related technologies (Javascript, CSS, etc.), but now I'm feeling very anal about writing HTML tags to make sure they are up to XHTML standards and feel like I need to use the "strong" tag instead of the "b"old tag, etc. Weird.
• Remember the Other Paul? He's the guy who I agreed to write a novel with at the beginning of last summer, but it never got off the ground. Now he's a coworker at ITA. He's high on my list of people. A kind of bonzai tree of a personality--a unique and fascinating identity that seems to have shaped by having to grow with aspects of his personality and ego tied at odd angles (although that's the kind of guess that could be wildly inaccurate--I know very little about his past.) He is one of those rare, brilliant people who are worthy in so many ways but reflexively self-deprecate when exposed to strong stimuli (criticism, praise, bright light, loud white noise...) Formerly a member of the infamous Games House, which would make him very easy to caricature, but endowed with lots of hidden talents and hobbies and armed with a broad base of knowledge. He's quiet about it, but his dating history is also, from what I gather, varied and includes some interesting characters. (This topic--other people's romantic lives--are still something that feels a little alien to me. Right now, anybody who has made it through more than one or two relationships in their life has a kind of mystique for me. Yes, I know this includes almost everybody on the planet. Shut up.]
  
  Anyway, I bring him up because he's been an important part of life lately. He invited my sister, Chuck Washington (who deserves more attention from this journal, since he's been one of my most consistent companions this summer), two other former members of Games House/Brown CS graduates/ITA employees (Mike and Catherine, for those in the know), and myself to his house in the 'burbs to watch The Shadow, which is an incredible movie. Oh my god, it was awesome. "When are you going to come down and see my Beryllium Sphere?"
  
  He and I also decided to start, on a whim, a serial fiction blog, starting in the hardboiled noir genre and rolling on from their: Good Sense is the Master of Human Life. It's sort of in its rough beginning stages right now--when we have time we may start screwing with the template, etc.
• Speaking of good movies, last weekend I was in Providence with Katie and we saw Wordplay, which was very solid and interesting in the "documentary about a quirky competitive subculture" genre. Includes Jon Stewart, Bill Clinton, and lots of nerdy folk with whom I have deep sympathies. It's about crossword puzzlers.
  
  Katie and I played a lot of Scrabble, which will now hold a whole new set of associations for me.
• Things are really coming together intellectually in a satisfying way. The various classical pragmatist readings (Peirce, James, The Metaphysical Club) mesh well with the contemporary Putnam book (blah blah blah blah Fact/Value blabbity, which is really giving me hope about being able to think constructively about ethics, which is something I've been a little lost at for the past year or so. Meanwhile, I've been looking into conceptual role semantics ([1][2]), which is awesome, since it gives some very solid-seeming answers to questions about semantics and meaning in a way that is compatible with functionalist philosophy of mind as well as (to my happy surprise) pragmatist definitions of truth! Wouldn't it be sweet to have a coherent system of thought about this stuff (mind/truth/meaning)? With ethics in there too? How grand! Who knows--it could even spin out into a political theory--which I've been thinking about again thanks to Piotr's insistence and the re-emergence into my life of The Dissident, the Critical Review, and Jeffrey Friedman, as well as the Putnam book's investigation into Amartya Sen's metaethics. It's like what I've wanted since high school: firm footing. When I get another batch of free time and if my wrists aren't bothering me (stupid coding job...) I'll write something up for the communities or for Invented Usage.